It's a gaming slash video and photo editing PC, so I went all out, and paid top dollar for it (4 years ago now?). In fact I just spent another bunch of money upgrading it recently. It's my main hobby, so I like to keep it up to date. I put a EVGA GTX 980 Ti in it and doubled my RAM a few months ago. It was actually about a month before NVidia announced the new 1000 series cards... because that is usually how my luck with that goes.

leftie wrote:Swapped out my Macbook's drive for an SSD and wow, what a difference. Havent looked back since.

Also, I have a desktop thats roughly 10 years old and is running WIn 10. When taking a look at the task manager performance tab, it seems like the disk is the weakest link (always maxing out at 100% usage). Im thinking of swapping it out for an SSD in the hope that itll breathe new life into the system

The Disk is has always been the bottleneck slowing down systems and the biggest reason it took so long to get mobile phones and other devices that are fast.

I'm not a data hoarder by any means. I think anyone that has more than 500 gig of data is crazy. That's how you get caught.

So I had a similar issue recently... How can I best store my data long-term? I decided to go with FreeNAS because of the following:- HDDs are the cheapest medium for mass storage- HDDs are prone to be faulty but so is any alternative; just might take longer- FreeNAS offers Raid-Z which can do up to triple parity; other raids only offer double- you only need 1GB ram for every TB that you wanna backup; ram is cheap nowadays- FreeNAS comes with a slew of monitoring services and periodic snapshots; this means, if I accidentally delete something, I can still recover up to a week (I don't think it's worth saving for longer)- I can also snapshot my FreeNAS OS with all configs so if it goes down, my backup system can automatically be used as a switch-over- since everything is done in RAM, I can use it all the time without impacting how long it takes for me to access or write data; the physical things are done in the background

I chose FreeNAS because it is quite simply, in a league of its own. It was relatively cheap to setup and I've never had issues with it. In fact, someone took my USB (hosting the FreeNAS OS) out and reformatted it; I was able to recover my system in under 15 min without any data loss.

There are alternative ways of storing data long-term, such as: more expensive storage mediums that will last longer but will, inevitably fail one day or cloud services which are pricier and obviously a security concern. I would recommend FreeNAS to anyone who is interested in this; please don't confuse FreeNAS with FreeBSD or CentOS that also use ZFS. FreeNAS has a whole bunch more in there.

Also, I only recommend this until they come out with those small pieces of glass that store data for over 13 billion years. But who knows how expensive that will be...

OK so I got an Orico USB external drive enclosure, and also got a couple new HDDs, one WD Blue 1TB SSD and a WD Black 4TB. As it turns out, my old storage drives seem to work fine and come back with no errors when I used them in the external drive enclosure, so I went ahead and ordered a 2 bay one with fan cooling. So now, assuming my two old drives continue to work, I will end up with 1.5TB of SSD storage on three drives, and near 10TB of storage space on regular HDDs.